Computer vision or visual scene analysis is the scientific field of extracting information from images such as video sequences. The discipline is applied to a large number of applications, for instance for human visual activity recognition, the identification of human activities based on video data captured through one or more cameras.
A critical issue in this and many other computer vision applications is the placement of the cameras. As video sequences are projections of 3D space onto a 2D image plane by a camera, the camera setup (the position and the viewing angle) determines whether the captured video material is suitable for the computer vision task or not. For an application to function optimally, it is important that the camera is positioned in the best possible manner for that particular application, meaning that when e.g. the application is video conferencing, it is important that all speakers are visible to the other parties, but the camera position tends to be fixed in such conferencing systems. Several solutions for computer vision applications for such video conferencing exist. In US 20070058879 as an example, the solution is based on panoramic, whereas in JP 2008061260 the solution is based on fish-eye lenses. Another video conferencing system sets its camera configuration based on the detected positions of the users (JP 2005311734). These approaches are however only successful when the objects of interest do not occlude each other. They are however inadequate for many computer vision applications.
Nearly all computer vision systems face a fundamental challenge, namely how to determine an optimal camera setup. This problem becomes especially relevant when the end-users themselves have to position the camera, instead of an expert. From the point of view of the end-users, it should preferably be easy and straightforward to find the optimal camera setup such that the objects of interest do not occlude each other. One possible solution is to use additional cameras. However, there are considerable downsides of this approach, such as the additional costs relating to installing additional cameras, and the additional effort required to install them.